


Brutus

by toniwilder



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Dementia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loki (Marvel) Feels, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki Posing as Odin, Odin's Bad Parenting (Marvel), Odin's Good Parenting (Marvel), Parent-Child Relationship, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26093815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toniwilder/pseuds/toniwilder
Summary: “I cannot stand you,” he hisses into the old man’s ear. “And I cannot kill you. But I will not have you haunt me anymore. I refuse.”AKA The between scene in The Dark World of how Loki usurped Odin.
Relationships: Loki & Odin (Marvel)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 31





	Brutus

_I've been watching him for my entire life_   
_I hate the air he breathes_   
_His foolish decrees, his words so contrived_   
_And I hate the way the townspeople gather outside_   
_They hang on every breath_   
_Cling to his chest, home to his heart full of pride_   
_The oracle told him to beware the Ides_   
_And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't wishing_   
_For untimely death or demise_   
_Or am I just wishing I could be like you?_   
_That the people would see me, too, as a poet_   
_And not just the muse_

_Brutus by The Buttress_

* * *

“We found a body.”

“Loki.”

He says it with such hollow declaration, because of course Loki would be the one dead in escape. Birthright and all that. Loki’s heart speeds and he steps forward, illusion aside. The hole in his gut lightens now that his magic can be used, unburdened, to heal. Odin turns to him and the hollowness is there as well. In his eye, in his hunched form.

 _You look weary, Allfather,_ Loki hears Laufey say in the back of his brain. Back in a time where he only guessed he was other and monster. Not when he knew.

Odin’s grip tightens on Gungnir. When he speaks, Loki expects anger.

Odin says, “Why have you returned here?” and it is only the hollow.

“Why do you think?” Loki steps forward.

Odin peers back at him, searching, and murmurs, “Would you have me call your bluff twice, boy? If you wish to live, I’m giving you the means. Go, trickster.” Then, the bastard king, turns away from Loki like the conversation is boring him.

Loki snarls. “Go where? What places have you left me option, Allfather?”

His arm whips out and he grabs Odin by the neck, like Odin has done to him and Thor has done to him, and so many others—the Titan with his hands wrapped around his jugular in threat before Loki is bending below him, submissive and empty. Loki grabs tighter. Odin winces.

“Would you be god of patricide now, Loki?” Something cruel in the words, like it is a joke between old friends. “Is that who you wish to be to us now? Fallen prince, estranged son and brother, murderer of both fathers?”

Loki curls his fingers into the old man’s neck and tears them away, something satisfying in hearing the old man hiss breath out from the friction. When Loki spares a glance at his fingers, they have a coating of Odin’s iron blood on the tips.

“I killed Laufey because you were too cowardly in your truce to do it yourself, Odin. If I end this conversation with you, dead at my feet, it will be because you were cowardly once more. No one’s fault but your own. You raised the monster, Allfather.” He bares his teeth. “I would not seek blame to a tiger unleashed from its gilded cage as you seek to do for your mistakes.”

Odin’s eye narrows and his head shakes. Loki remembers the wooziness of the old man in the vault the day of his exposed identity and nearly reverts back to the fear of it all. Instead of feeding the child inside, Loki growls, “Do not shake your head as though I speak anything but the truth.”

“You lie. As you always do.” Odin murmurs the words like it’s a simple fact of life. “Your mistake exists in continuing this farce. Just bend, Loki. You are so close to it.”

“Bend?”

Loki finds his steps taking him back just a meer inches.

“Give up this obsession with being a monster, it does not suit you.” When Odin peers up at him again, Loki’s heart jolts into a quickstep. “I cannot bare continuing this game. I have tried fighting you for the end of the rope and now I beg, boy. For the sake of your mother. Please bend your stubborn will enough to stop this and admit you are wrong.”

“Wrong?” Loki charges forward, knocks Odin off his feet so he topples backwards onto the ground. Gungnir flies aside from them and Odin holds one hand above his head like Loki is a shining sun that beats down on him—burns him. “I am doing nothing if not giving truth to your prophecy, Allfather. If any way is wrong in my actions, it will always be by your actions.”

He grabs Odin by the front of his cloak and twists his wrist so the old man comes close. The wound in Loki’s gut curls and he hunches to avoid the acid wash of pain from the sudden movements. He drops Odin, just as sudden as he grabbed him, and Odin grunts at the drop.

“You are wounded.”

Loki growls. “It is nothing to concern yourself with, Allfather.”

Odin only shakes his head and sighs, “Oh, Loki.” His hand reaches outwards and he pulls Loki’s cloak free. The wound from the Kursed drops a clot of blood onto the floor between them and Odin’s mouth presses into a thin line underneath the white of his beard.

“How did you receive this?” Then, “Was it Thor?”

Loki pulls away, covers the wound with his arm. “Would you give him a medal, Allfather?”

“Don’t fight me,” Odin pleads.

Loki keeps his arm wrapped around his gut and the two stay, one crouched and the other splayed. Two broken men, cast open by their losses and hatred.

“I would not have you pity me after you put me in the dungeons to rot,” Loki says to the ground.

“If you could not escape the dungeons on your own, you would have deserved it,” Odin replies. “But you are my son, and you have never been adept at being kept.”

“I am not. How many times must I cast you aside before you understand? I do not claim you.” Loki glares at him now for good measure. “You are not my father.”

Odin smirks. “Alright, Loki.” He motions with one hand to the wound. “You will need to care for that. The smell of poison is wrought through it already.”

“Would you call off your dogs so I could be treated? Go back on your word on your vile experiment gone awry?”

Odin simply shrugged. “I suppose so.”

The anger comes back like a sandstorm and encompasses Loki so he only knows the moment on the ground, so close to Odin he can smell the leather of his clasps, and then his hand on the top of the old man’s throat and pressing him down into the golden tile of the throne room. The seidr whips out of him and wraps around Odin’s larynx until he is gasping from it.

God of patricide. Loki could be that again. He had already done it once, and Laufey had at least a blood claim to his fatherhood. What did Odin have but the immense ability to stomp over Loki and everything good? Loki’s hand curls around Odin Borson’s throat and Odin shuts his eye as the God of Mischief squeezes.

The tear slips out from Odin's closed lid and tickles when it touches Loki’s knuckle.

“I can’t do this.” He says it before he knows it, pulls his hands to his chest, and keens, “I cannot do this.”

Odin isn’t moving below him, his eye isn’t even open. His hand reaches up to caress the side of Loki’s cheek and Loki screams wordlessly. He presses down until his head is in the shoulder of Odin’s armor and his lips meet metal so the anguish reverberates like a terrible gong in the room. Odin must have warded the throne room when Loki revealed himself, there was no reason for Loki to still be here. The blood on Odin’s neck sears through Loki’s nose and chokes the sob out of him. Odin shushes him once and runs a hand through the black curls pressed with sweat to the back of Loki’s neck.

The time between an instant in a moment is weighed too heavily with emotion to measure and Loki finds the seidr coiled in his gut like a snake’s venom when Odin weaponizes Loki’s grief and says;

“And so you finally bend.”

He cannot kill Odin. For a reason he cannot fathom, cannot bring himself to address with his gut on fire and the old man laughing below him in a rasp that lights Loki’s brain on fire, he knows that the rage will not kill. It is too marred by something else, maybe the image of mother’s sad smile and Thor’s wailing over him in Svartlheim. Loki opens his eyes and lifts himself to stare at Odin, who laughs and cries underneath him, and decides with the quickness that served him in the Titan’s sanctuary what he must do.

The seidr whips around his heart and up into his brain that Loki can only think of the task at hand. Tears gone, he presses his lips to the crest of Odin’s head.

“I cannot stand you,” he hisses into the old man’s ear. “And I cannot kill you. But I will not have you haunt me anymore. I refuse.”

When the magic enters his mind, the Allfather gasps. He tenses and thrusts his arm outward to throw Loki off. Loki whips his own arm out so he turns over as though on an axel. Odin shakes his head back and forth like a wet dog and growls, “What have you done? What have you done?!”

He turns to Loki on the ground and yells, a slur to his words, “What have you done to me!?”

Loki keeps his eyes shut as Odin grabs him by the collar, jostles the wound in Loki’s gut, and shakes him with such fervor Loki didn’t know he could still possess. It acts like a dying pendulum, getting weaker with each thrust as Odin becomes tired and confused.

Then he stops and Loki opens his bleary eyes to stare up at the ceiling—at the mural upon the throne room’s center room of the half-dead King’s family. Odin says,

“Where… am I?” He turns his head to Loki, still in his grasp. “Oh… Who…”

Odin’s grip loosens and Loki drops to the ground from his hold with a grunt.

“Who are… you?”

Loki lifts himself, his arm pressing close to his reopened wound, and takes the sight of Odin Allfather in. His bright, omniscient eye is glassy with a human’s cataracts and his tilts his head at Loki’s attention.

“Oh, hello,” the man who was once Odin says. “Where am I?”

“It matters not,” Loki promises. “I will be taking you back to your home.”

Odin nods. “Oh. Alright.” He notes their odd position then, Odin on top of him with old knees sprawled open so Loki cannot move. He stumbles aside, ungraceful, and falls over himself into the floor. When he moans, it’s weak and with a lasting ache. Loki ignores the pang in his own gut and stands.

“Come here,” Loki orders and the old man shakes his head weakly.

“Oh, can’t do that. Too old. S’hurts,” he slurs.

Loki walks to him and grabs him by the arm. Odin pulls away with a yelp and Loki grabs him again.

“You need to follow me,” Loki growls. Odin winces at the tone and stares down at the ground childishly.

“Why?”

The words come out easily, like most lies, “I am your son.”

He takes Odin to Earth through the back alleys of the veil and Odin follows, stumbling and sometimes weeping in his confusion. When they reach the nursing home in New York, Odin is loudly sobbing in his new Earthen clothes against Loki’s chest.

Loki hands him over to the staff with a folder of papers that say the things the doctors of Earth like to blame brain sickness on like dementia and cellular degradation. He signs the papers with a pseudonym that lists him as the old man’s son.

When the nurse pulls Odin away from Loki, Odin’s hands make claw marks in Loki’s back and he weeps in slurred horror, “I love you,” at him over and over again until he is dragged into the building with humans he cursed so many times before.

Loki leaves New York and enters the throne room, still warded, with a drag in each step. He lifts Gungnir into his hands and puts upon a glamour that eliminates Loki from the room. When he weeps, he does so as Odin to hear his voice, and when he screams, screams at the walls of the throne room, he does so to remember why Odin is not before him.

Odin does not deserve Asgard.

Not anymore. 

**Author's Note:**

> What up, I'm writing Dark World fic in 2020 to cope with my weird relationship with my dad!


End file.
